Courtroom waiting game a cold, hard reality for family members

Val Fortney, Calgary Herald07.10.2014

Lawyer Kim Ross, the legal representative for Douglas Garland, is seen outside a Calgary court on Friday. Garland, described by police as the only person of interest in the disappearance of Kathy and Alvin Liknes and their five-year-old grandson Nathan O’Brien, has been released on bail.

As the search for a missing five-year-old boy and his grandparents stretched into its 11th day Thursday, police say they’ll continue pouring resources...

It is a freedom with limits, accompanied by a list of conditions as long as the rap sheets of some of the sad characters appearing ahead of him in courtroom 306.

Douglas Garland, incarcerated for the past week on stolen identity and credit card charges, is nevertheless a freer man than the day before thanks to $750 bail, headed to “transition” accommodation somewhere in Calgary.

On Friday, it takes the better part of the morning for the balding, squinting 54-year-old to make his courtroom appearance on CCTV. Local and national media, along with Rod O’Brien and Allen Liknes, O’Brien’s brother-in-law and spouse of Douglas Garland’s sister, wait on the event.

The crowd for these relatively minor charges, nearly everyone across the country knows by now, is because Garland, a troubled man with a criminal past, is the sole person of interest in the police investigation into the disappearance June 30 of Kathy and Alvin Liknes and their grandson, five-year-old Nathan O’Brien.

Starting last weekend and continuing as we sit in an air-conditioned courtroom, police search several rural areas in and around the acreage where Garland lives with his elderly parents. The search this past week also included police sifting through mountains of garbage at two local landfills. Police also confirmed this week they are looking into business issues that may involve the family and Garland.

The courtroom wait is one of several hours, as a revolving door of lawyers and people dealing with drug and impaired driving charges take their turns before the judge. While we’re all familiar with the scheduling priorities of the court — a juggling act of lawyers running from one courtroom to the other for different clients, among other things — it seems coldly cruel that the father of Nathan O’Brien has to wait along with the rest of us.

O’Brien, though, is familiar with the drill. It’s his third time here this week: since there is little else he can do, he at least makes sure the person of interest, the court and the rest of the world always remember that there is a suffering family behind the daily, now international, headlines of this most confounding case of abduction.

In this waiting game, we find ourselves frequently sitting outside the courtroom on soft benches, whiling away our time between the various adjournments and breaks. Though O’Brien and Liknes stand close by, we behave as though on a crowded elevator. We maintain the respectful distance O’Brien credited media for at the Thursday candlelight vigil, helping to keep the case of his missing family in the spotlight, being close by but not too close by.

When the frail looking, balding man comes into view, he almost crashes into the camera lens. It’s more a bumbling than a threatening stance, though, as the bespectacled prisoner in blue coveralls appears to be struggling to see.

He listens along with the rest of us to the conditions of his release, which include a daily curfew from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m., the surrendering of any passports he may possess — this is, after all, an individual who went undetected for years by using the stolen identity of a dead teenager — and reporting to a bail supervisor three days a week.

When he asks about how the curfew might affect his need to be out working on the farm late into the evening, it’s clear Garland, described as a genius, doesn’t quite grasp all the terms of his conditions.

It’s something his lawyer Kim Ross doesn’t do quite an adequate job explaining, either. As he’s questioned by a wall of reporters outside the courtroom while an outdoor Stampede party roars on across the street, Ross has little more to offer than the “no comment” answer to which we’ve all become accustomed since the family first disappeared. “I’ve only had limited contact with him, I’ve only been retained a couple of days ago,” says Ross, emphasizing that the strict conditions of Garland’s freedom were agreed upon by both Crown and defence.

“All he’s in here for is the identity theft and that’s all we’re dealing with right now,” says Ross of the charges unrelated to the abduction. “I’m not trying to be difficult … all I’ve discussed with him are the charges before him right now.”

Nearly two weeks into this crime that has shocked a nation, this is all we know for sure: there is a person of interest, seen on court video, free but not entirely; there is another video, that of a green truck, that led police to him; and there continues to be an unprecedented search of that man’s rural home, along with an investigation into his business and family ties to the missing.

In this day of cold, hard facts, though, there remains one that is the coldest of all: there is a Calgary family, undergoing the most unimaginable suffering as each minute goes by, wondering if Kathy, Alvin and little Nathan are alive and needing their help.